What is Customizer

As explained by Martin, Customizer sits as a proxy between IBM Connections and the end-user, which gives it the ability to intercept and modify requests and responses, and thus customize anything that flows through it. Read Martin’s blog post for better understanding of how Customizer works and about the competition. You can also read the full Customizer documentation here.

Event Details and Prizes

The event started on September 14th and ends on Thursday the 12th of October 2017 (Which means there’s only 3 days left as of this article’s submission). Winners will be announced at Social Connections in Vienna on the 16th/17th October 2017. The top 3 entrants will each receive an iPad Mini.

Is it easy to get up and running with Customizer?

I managed to get my environment up and running within an hour. It only takes a few minutes to register a trial account on IBM Connections Cloud and setup the GitHub repository, but the activation of Customizer on your cloud environment is done by IBM, so you might land up waiting a little while for that. As I said, within an hour I was up and running.

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, once your IBM Connections account is active, you will need to setup a GitHub repository and invite the IBM Connections Developers GitHub account. This also only takes a few minutes and requires some manual intervention on IBM’s side. This video will show you how to setup your IBM Connections Cloud account as well as fork your GitHub repository.

Skills required for participating in the competition

You will need a decent understanding of the following platforms, tools and languages to be able to participate in the competition:

Dojo (NOTE: The IBM Connections Platform makes use of Dojo, which is very similar to jQuery)

Thanks to the supporting video tutorials, documentation and samples, you shouldn’t struggle too much if you find your skillset slightly less than sufficient. I’m also willing to assist wherever possible, so feel free to contact me via Twitter, LinkedIn or Email (john dot jardin at gmail dot com).

A final note if you’re only starting now

3 days sounds like quite a short time, but in reality you could get 2-3 extensions working within a day, all depending on the complexity of the extensions you create. Don’t be shy to ask for assistance via the social channels. On Twitter I’m following the #IBMConnections and #Customizer hash tags, so be sure to include them when tweeting.

For those about to join and for those already creating extensions, I wish you all the very best of luck. I’ve already finalized 3 and hope to do 1 more. I look extremely forward to seeing what extensions are created by the community as part of this competition.